March 8 - 10, 2019

Understanding Kubernetes: Meshing Around with Istio

Sunday - Mar 10 2:15 PM
- JEFFERSON

Jonathan Johnson

Software Architect

Kubernetes out of the box is a strong platform for running and coordinating large collections of services, containers, and applications. As is, Kubernetes is powerful for many solutions.

Remember Underdog? He was a mild-mannered dog, but when stress and conflict were introduced to the plot he took a magic pill, he became a superhero. Istio is a superhero for Kubernetes.

Istio is an open, platform-independent service mesh that manages communications between services in a transparent way. With a distributed architecture many things can fail, slow down and become less secure. Istio provides solutions to those stresses in our plot toward this architecture style:

We will explore these benefits with Istio through some working examples on Kubernetes. The key point is this meshing solution allows your code to be less coupled to the inherent weaknesses of a distributed platform.

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About Jonathan Johnson

Jonathan Johnson is a platform architect at Intelligent Artifacts, formulating the symbiosis of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) platform with the Kubernetes ecosystem, and a software architect at Dijure LLC.

Jonathan is halfway into his second score of engineering commercial software, driven by his desire to design helpful software to move us forward. His applications began with laboratory instrument software and managing its data. Jonathan was enticed by the advent of object-oriented design to develop personal banking software. Banking soon turned to the internet, and enterprise applications took off. Java exploded onto the scene, and since then he has inhabited that ecosystem. At 454 Life Sciences and Roche Diagnostics, Jonathan returned to laboratory software and leveraged Java-based state machines and enterprise services to manage the terabytes of data flowing out of DNA sequencing instruments. Then as a hands-on architect at Thermo Fisher Scientific, he applied the advantages of microservices, containers, and Kubernetes to their laboratory management platform.

Jonathan enjoys comparing and sharing his adventures with peers. He shares ways to modernize application architectures while adhering to the fundamentals of high modularity and low coupling. A longtime resident of Connecticut, he discusses his experiences with technical groups and meetups.